Two men's names recur in the news this week, both are poets and activists: Dennis Brutus, who has died, and Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to eleven years in jail. You will find news and poetry of Dennis Brutus in the Great Regulars section, from Hillel Italie, E. Ethelbert Miller, and PBS Newshour, and in our Poetic Obituaries. Links to news on Liu Xiaobo's situation are in our News at Eleven section, and in Great Regulars from the Dalai Lama and Luisetta Mudie.

We begin with Willis Barnstone, linking to both an article on his translation of the Bible, and an interview with him. This leads off a very big week in poetry news. So I'd best let you get to reading.

of the purported authors of the familiar gospel stories. Matthew becomes Mattityahu. Mark morphs into Markos, Luke is Loukas. John appears as Yohanan. John the Baptist is renamed Yohanan the Dipper.

[Willis] Barnstone adds three other versions of the story, the recently discovered Gnostic gospels of Toma (Thomas), Yehuda (Judas) and Miryam of Magdala (Mary Magdalene), and argues in his commentary that they are at least as important and potentially accurate depictions as the canonical accounts that made it past the theological censors and into that ancient anthology we call the Bible.

The next thing you notice about the Barnstone Bible is the poetry, which is this translator's real passion.

gets the artist into trouble. How do you move from figures of speech back to the concrete practices of the Jewish world without being conned by the images you have created? [Stanley] Moss suggests that we imitate the ancient Jewish stonemasons who would willfully mar their work in some way. In Moss's case, this means that the writer of "Bad Joke" has to turn his anger into vaudeville by showing how limited his poetic means truly are.

God loves a people and they love him. Rumi in fact alludes to a famous tradition--"I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known, so I created the creation to be known"--explaining love as the underlying motivation for God's creation:

Were it not for the ocean of pure love What reason would I have to forge the heavens?Masnavi 5: 2739

Rumi even seems to posit love as the primal element of creation, a vital force that stirs the universe and creates the noosphere (to borrow a term from Teilhard de Chardin):

It is not possible to stop the ever-flowing stream of life forcefully. You can channel it with craft and wisdom but you cannot stop it by erecting walls in its way," he [Abdurrahman Roghani] says, referring to the acts of militants who banned all artistic expression and destroyed hundreds of shops selling music in the valley.

"[The] human heart can only be dominated by love and affection, not weapons and war."

pursuing political reforms, a Chinese court on Friday sentenced one of the country's best-known dissidents to 11 years in prison for subversion.

Liu Xiaobo, 53, a former literature professor and a dogged critic of China's single-party political system, was detained in December 2008 after he helped draft a petition known as Charter 08 that demanded the right to free speech, open elections and the rule of law.

a feeling I've never gotten in New York--the historical echo of the spaces downtown, the feeling that everyone who has ever worked here is still here. There's a profoundly good feeling of being connected with the generations."

[Reginald] Gibbons' poems are both precise descriptions of the physical landscape and vivid dispatches from an emotional response to it all. "I try to pay attention to the whole web of the concrete world and the human world," he says.

second collection of poems (and her first in close to 30 years), is a book consumed not so much with mortality as with transience, of which mortality is one aspect. Another is the way our most casual choices come to define us, a process Pollitt likes to enact by letting casual-seeming analogies take over whole poems. "Death can't help but look friendly/when all your friends live there," she writes in "Old," "while more and more/each day's like a smoky party/where the music hurts and strangers insist that they know you."

a diabetic alcoholic, in the hospital after surgical amputation of half of one foot and three toes of the other. "There was no privacy, not even a thin curtain," he writes. "I guessed it made it easier for the nurses to monitor the postsurgical patients, but still, my father was exposed--his decades of poor health and worse decisions illuminated--on white sheets in a white hallway under white lights." It's a devastating image, one that resonates ("Valediction") with the burning light his father sees, on his deathbed, as "God passing judgment on Earth."

It's much smaller of course, smaller territory than South Africa, and somehow one has a feeling that the hostility, the animosity is much closer. People are literally in each others face. And the hatred I felt was much deeper than was in South Africa. South Africa one had a sense that there was a way out. In the case of Palestine/Israel, maybe because it's so hugely contested internationally, maybe because of the backing of the Western world, America particularly for Israel, it seems to be so much more hopeless.

rather than just any old junk, everything has to be approved by [Michael] Landy himself. If he likes it, it goes in. He only wants to destroy good stuff. This seems to be a matter of pride.

"I suddenly got protective about the bin, and I thought, 'I don't want just anything to go in.' So there's this completely subjective thing that only things I like will go in. There's not hard and fast rules, to be honest. Erm, hmmm, yeah."

The decade now ends with the threatening shadows still in the caves and the whole thing bookended by another recession caused by unreal money. The banks were worth trillions and then they weren't. The enemy was invisible and money unreal. In the Noughties, all that was solid melted into air, into thin air.

No wonder we felt insecure. Shadows wanted us to die, and we might at any moment be broke. In fact, if you want the word of the decade, here it is: "security".

is a product of its time and place and also fair to say, as [Billy] Collins does, that [Richard] "Brautigan's best book is a contribution to the fishing literature of Hemingway and Izaak Walton, and the theme of trout fishing allows him to conduct a wandering investigation of the many creeks that are tributaries to the troubled and fascinating waters of American history and mythology."

The poem becomes a symbolic vessel for imagination and metaphor. In cultural and civic life, a poet's role is to bring a reflective prowess and moral persuasion to public discourse--to embody the poet's ancient burden to speak to the tribe and represent the tribe.

The bathroom was for, well, using the bathroom. Dinnertime was about sharing a meal with friends or family, and mornings were about waking up. Most radically, home was simply home. Work may have been on our minds, but it wasn't in our hands (or pockets).

But now, thanks to the BlackBerry (and the iPhone, and the Treo, and all the other hand-held e-mail devices), we are always connected.

of Spoon River," Harry reminds the town's residents that they "never marveled," that the drunkard Chase Henry "voted to shut down the saloons." It might seem odd that a drunkard would vote for Prohibition, but the saloons had stopped giving Chase credit; thus, he could no longer get drunk anyway and thus got revenge by helping to shut down the taverns.

By sentencing Liu Xiaobo and others like him, who use freedom of expression to publicly articulate their opinions, the Chinese authorities have not only violated the binding principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the freedom of expression mentioned in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China.

I urge the Chinese Government to release, as soon as possible, Liu Xiaobo and other political prisoners who were jailed for exercising their freedom of expression.

I offer my regards and prayers to Mr. Liu Xiaobo, his wife and other family members.

than a dozen collections of poetry, including "A Simple Lust," "Stubborn Hope" and "Salutes and Censures." In 2006, Haymarket published a compilation of his work, "Poetry and Protest." His work was banned for years in South Africa, but one book, "Thoughts Abroad," slipped through; it was published in 1970 under the pseudonym John Bruin.

He received numerous honorary prizes, including a lifetime achievement award from South Africa's Department of Arts and Culture.

was a fit enough theological ninja to convert me. He'd met my doubts with his trademark delight and none of the stern piety my lapsed Catholic friends often railed against from pre-Vatican II catechisms. He'd never betrayed his vow of obedience, though. "I don't believe the pope is the ultimate religious authority," I'd said. "Maybe you will some day," he'd said. "I think women should be priests," I'd said. "I'm sure the Holy Father prays about that a lot," he'd said.

Alfred Tennyson, George B. Shaw, Marianne Moore and Robert Graves, for example, all met their end "ripe with time and full of years." Among contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, and Richard Wilbur are writing and publishing into their 80s.

But perhaps the poet who best epitomizes this phenomenon of longevity is Stanley Kunitz, who had a long and illustrious career and was considered by many to be the most distinguished American poet at the time of his death in 2006 at the age of 100.

What happens when we peek around the corner and try to see ahead or guess what's coming? I want to walk into 2010 with a degree of optimism and hope. I would even like to strut into happiness. I don't want two major wars in the world to become three. I don't want Katrina to introduce me to her sister or girlfriend and hit a city with another disaster.

E.M.: Tell us something about your life as a political figure and also as an artist.

D.B.: Well, I grew up as most blacks do, in a ghetto, in South Africa. My education was a missionary education by nuns who came from Ireland, Scotland, England or elsewhere. In some ways that was, of course, an advantage because the missionary approach, I believe, was a less racist one than that of the white administration of the State.

to register a top-level Chinese-language domain has to apply to a government bureau and produce a whole series of documents. In reality, this rule has taken away the right of Chinese citizens to set up their own Web sites."

"In other words, only companies and government agencies will be able to do so in future. Ordinary citizens will no longer have the right to do so." [--Liu Feiyue]

was more optimistic. Commentators who consider the thrush to represent the poet himself surely have a good point. He was frail and bird-like in appearance, and he had discovered an abundant poetic inspiration towards the end of his life that must have seemed at times miraculously "illimited".

Let the poet-thrush's "happy good night air" sing us out of 2009, with all my thanks and good wishes to friends old and new, on (and behind the scenes of), Poem of the Week.

They were listened to long before they ever could be read. That a sound made with lips and tongue and voice could become associated with something encountered in the world--a tree, the sky, another person--surely is a kind of miracle. "In the beginning was the word" certainly applies to the world we inhabit.

I wonder if we do not do our children a disservice by teaching them to read too soon.

was the most brilliant and celebrated Iranian poet of the 19th century, known for his melodious verses. His famous elegy (above) is the most popular tribute to Imam Hussein (AS) written by an Iranian poet. This famous elegy is inscribed on the walls of the holy shrine of Imam Ali Reza (AS) in Mashhad in Iran. Although considered to be the last of the classical poets, Qa'ani, in this tribute, breaks with the tradition of explanatory poetry and pays his tribute to the beloved Imam in the form of question and answer or a dialogue.

is uprooted and disregarded, and as our suppositions are rendered inadequate, we allow [Christian] Bok to bask in a retelling of perhaps the most celebrated story of all time--a daring move for both him and us.

Moreover, if you haven't noticed, the quotations above are restrained from using any other vowel but E. The project behind Eunoia is simple: Each of the five main prose poems is restricted to one and only one of the five vowels of the English language.

of Wallace Stevens's "Domination of Black". It resonates among the Suffolk stones as a reminder of those disquieting phenomena, often lurking within the beautiful, that are troubling to our sense of self, "poisonous as Ariel/to Prospero's own knowledge", but that cannot be ignored.

was "certainly a big loss to the Kannada literary and musical world. It was only through C. Ashwath's magical music that many great poems written by renowned Kannada poets became popular. His death will create a big void in Kannada music."

who worked as a lawyer for a state appellate court judge. His written works include an autobiography, "I Survived Cancer But Never Won the Tour de France," and two poetry books, "Like Some First Human Being" and "Antidotes & Home Remedies," which was a finalist for an Oklahoma Book Award in 2009.

Chastain participated in poetry readings across Oklahoma and the southwest. His writings are humorous and poignant, based largely on his experiences with cancer.

sang darkly comic and often disarmingly candid songs about death, vulnerability, and life's simple joys. A car accident when he was 18 left him partly paralyzed, but he has said that the accident focused him as a musician and a poet.

"It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say," he said in a recent radio interview with Terry Gross.

Webber Hospital and then Southern Maine Medical Center for more than 25 years, retiring as charge nurse in the maternity ward. All during these years, she and Chester owned and operated Drakes Island Store in the summer months.

After retiring from nursing, Mary went back to school and earned a degree in fine arts. It was here that she nurtured her love of painting and poetry. She was an avid reader and she also enjoyed plants, gardening, cooking and knitting.

years of singing in the choir, and a keen interest in adult education opportunities were important to her [Janet Knezel]. An insatiable appetite for reading and learning led to volunteer work with adult literacy education. It not only gave her pleasure, but brought transformation to those she helped. In her retirement years, Janet enjoyed auditing college classes. Expressing her thoughts through Haiku poetry reflected her fascination with words.

An Anthology of Byelorussian Poetry from 1828 to the Present Day, the first-ever Belarusian poetry anthology in a western language was published under the auspices of UNESCO. The book was banned for selling in the Soviet Union on the grounds of being politically incorrect.

In 1977, the first translation of Taras na Parnasie translated by Vera Rich and Arnold McMillin was published. A new compilation of Belarusian poetry, Poems on Liberty: Reflections for Belarus translated by Vera Rich came out in 2004.